The film employed a new virtue in North Korean cinema of short and condensed stories instead of multi-part epics.

The film opens with a quote from the Bible (for the first time in the history of North Korean cinema where only quotations from Kim Il Sung were typical): "You are the salt of the earth.

[3] The setting of the film is Kando (Jiandao) in the 1930s,[4] torn apart by ethnic conflict in which the Koreans are "literally caught in the crossfire" of Japanese occupiers,[5][4] Chinese bandits, and communist guerrillas.

[4] The local policing force is supposed to protect the peasants, but in truth only works when the interests of the Japanese occupiers are at stake.

[6] Her son Pong Shik runs off with a band of guerrillas,[4][6] and her other children fall ill and are denied care by a doctor.

The guerrillas vow to protect the common people and the mother realizes that her son did not run away from his family with bad intent, but was in fact a hero.

[5] Like Runaway, the film embodies a tension between Shin's desire for what is good cinema and the political motives it had to serve.

[19] A North Korean defector has testified to remembering going to watch the film several times with friends for the rape scene that exposes the mother's milky thigh "just to see that brief white flash of flesh".

[20] In addition to Shin's contribution as the director, the success of Salt is also attributable to a conscious change of policy in North Korean film making.

[26] Salt was included in a retrospective of Shin's filmography at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea 2001.